Growing a business can actually be a fairly simple process when you make use of the thousands of helpful growth hacking tools on the web. Best of all, some of them are completely free. Why pay to grow your business when you don’t have to?

Still, even the ones you pay for are well worth it if you want to see your numbers grow exponentially with little effort. They key to expanding your business in today’s world is to create a strong digital brand that helps promote your business. This means you have to venture into the world of websites, blogs, and social media.

Luckily, these five growth hacking tools are excellent helpers in this area. They are all online essential growth hacking tools that can help you analyze what you are doing great, fix what is not working so well, and provide you with insight about your competitors and your audience. In turn, you will get a bigger audience and more traffic to your website to help you grow your business.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a completely free tool provided by Google. Even though it’s free, it is one of the most important and helpful tools you can possibly use to grow your business and digital brand.

Google Analytics focuses on your website, the trends and behaviors of your audience, and the growth of your traffic. Your website is one of the single, most important things you should focus on to grow your business because it is often the first thing potential consumers see when they want to learn about your company.

To grow your website, you have to learn about your audience. Who is visiting your website? Where are they coming from? What do they look for when they visit? These are all questions that Google Analytics answers. When you learn more about your audience, you can further target your website to meet their needs, which will grow customer engagement and share-ability on social media.

Furthermore, Google Analytics can also provide you with insight about your social media campaigns, advertising campaigns, content performance, conversion for purchases, and more. Once you find out what is working well for you, you can target your budget to enhance performance from successful marketing areas. Google Analytics is one of the most versatile, all-around helpful, tools you can use to grow your business.

Outbrain

Outbrain is a tool that amplifies your content on some of the biggest websites, like CNN, Mashable, and Time Etc. Outbrain adds your content to relevant websites and content areas so that the people who are most likely to engage with your content see it and want to click over. In turn, you receive more engaged, targeted traffic that can generate more leads or sales for your business.

Additionally, when your content is added to top websites, you gain more recognition for your business. The content you add can be videos, blog posts, articles, press coverage, and reviews – all of which will be added to other sites professionally and seamlessly to enhance your brand recognition.

With Outbrain, you can choose to target audiences geographically to further pinpoint your perfect audience for your business. Are you a local business who wants to make more people in your immediate area aware of what you have to offer? Geo-targeting through Outbrain is perfect for you. Or, if you are looking to expand your business to other locations, you can engage possible interest in those locations before ever opening your doors.

Outbrain also allows you to set your budget for each of your campaigns so you can ensure that you don’t spend more than you can afford on advertising. Start a campaign with a low budget to gauge its interest and success. If it goes well, considering adding more to your budget to expand your campaign. You can budget as low as $10 a day, which is great for startups.

SumoMe ListBuilder

If you are looking for growth hacking tools, surely you have heard of the benefits of growing your e-mail list, a surefire way to generate more traffic to your website and leads or sales for your business.

ListBuilder by SumoMe is one of the most popular tools to build your e-mail list. ListBuilder advertises that it can increase your daily e-mail subscriber sign-ups by 20%, which is a significant amount, so you can turn one-time visitors into daily, engaged, followers or customers.

ListBuilder provides options for pop-ups to entice your visitors to subscribe to your e-mail list without being annoying. You can opt to have the pop-up show when someone arrives at your site, or once they decide to leave your site so you can have a chance to entice them to stay. If you have something you can offer them, like a free eBook with helpful tips related to your niche, this is the perfect time to offer it in exchange for an e-mail list sign-up!

Your digital brand is important, and ListBuilder understands that. So, it offers a lot of customization to make your pop-ups match your brand or website colors, so your brand flows throughout. All of this is free, but you can choose to upgrade to ListBuilder Pro for tools that can help you grow your e-mail list by another 20-50%.

After you grow your list, ListBuilder provides integration with the most popular newsletter-creation services, like MailChimp and Hubspot, so you can effortlessly send your newsletter to your new subscribers.

Sigstr

Now that you have your e-mail list built and are ready to start sending out some awesome newsletters, let Sigstr help you even more. Sigstr gets all of your e-mails, no matter who in your company sends them, looking cohesive and professional so your brand messaging remains consistent with every e-mail.

This is one of the best growth hacking tools to easily enhance your business by personalizing branded e-mail signatures for each of your employees while also staying consistent with your branding on each signature. Add your company logo, slogan, address, or whatever else you want to each e-mail while also customizing the sender’s name for more personalization.

You can also use Sigstr to promote content across your e-mails. Highlight your most recent promotion or campaign in all of your outgoing or scheduled e-mails by customizing just one template. Any changes you make to a campaign or signature is updated in real-time so all members of your team will have immediate access to the changes.

Sigstr also provides detailed analytics so you can track your employee’s displays and clicks and know how well each is performing with their e-mails. After all, effective e-mail campaigns are only as effective as the employees who create and send them, right?

BuzzSumo

So far, we have covered some excellent growth hacking tools to help you grow your business. Now, how can you work on continuously creating viral content that grows your traffic fast? One of the most talked about tools for online growth is BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo provides extensive research and insights so you can understand what type of content is working the best on your website – and create more of it! You can also take a peek at some of your competitors’ most successful content and take some pointers.

This sounds sneaky, but it’s actually a very solid strategy to understand what works in your niche and personalize that type of content to your brand. Or, you can find out what content does well for your competitors and offer them a spot to guest-post on your website to help bring in traffic.

Once you have a few ideas in mind for successful content, BuzzSumo helps you optimize your headlines and your content structure to make the most eye-catching content to drive potential consumers to your site.

Growth hacking tools are so widely available that it can be difficult to narrow down the most effective ones. These five essential growth hacking tools are some of the most popular for bloggers and businesses all over the world who want to grow their business presence easily and fast. The more time you save by letting online tools do most of the legwork, the more time you’ll have to focus on your business.